Peer-to-peer networks continue to increase in popularity due to many desirable features, such as adaptation, self-organization, load-balancing, fault-tolerance, low cost, high availability, scalability, and ability to provide a large pool of resources. For example, peer-to-peer networks have emerged as a popular way to share large amounts of data, such as by peers downloading songs that are referenced as being available for download from another peer in the peer-to-peer network.
Traditional architectures that are utilized to provide the peer-to-peer networks, however, have not addressed the ever increasing numbers of members, i.e. nodes, which may form the system. For instance, a current example of a peer-to-peer network has provided more than 230 million downloads to more than four million users. The number of members, however, is expected to continually increase such that an ultra-large system may be encountered that has over one trillion nodes. Therefore, even though current architectures may address a system having a large number of nodes, these current architectures may still prove inadequate when employed in an ultra-large system.
To locate a particular resource in a peer-to-peer network, for instance, each node in the network may reference one or more other nodes in the network to locate a node having the particular resource, e.g. a particular item of data. Therefore, a series of “hops” may be employed as a request is routed from one node to another until the particular item is located. As the number of hops increases, the use of hardware and software resources of the nodes, as well as the network resources of the system also increases. Thus, the increased number of hops may result in an inefficient use of the resources of the system as well as increase the amount of time utilized to locate the particular item.
Accordingly, there is a continuing need for improved routing in peer-to-peer networks.